Subtext that copyright is “broken” seems entirely fair, both in the gross sense that as a whole it isn’t anywhere close to optimal public policy and narrowly, many of its specifics are bizarre or offensive. Retroactive extension is probably the canonical instance of both. Little special about copyright in its brokenness; suspect many other policy areas with similarly shaped capture and obscurantism, and each ought be thought of as broken. In a way that matters? Does that mean in a way that is fixable on a timescale humans can easily appreciate and through intentional actions by humans? Maybe not, but that seems an almost too cynical assessment. If the subtext of “broken” implies instead that there’s one “fix”, if only we did x or stopped doing y, that’s totally unrealistic. I prefer to attempt to assess the entire iceberg, not the contested tip represented by x or y. But that’s probably little more than an aesthetic preference on my part. And it misses the glacier from which the entire iceberg has broken off of…